


Dionysus; or, "It's like flicking a switch."

by the_bright_eyed_demigirl



Category: Persona 3, Persona 4
Genre: Gen, au in which teddie is a robot, made by the kirijo group
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 05:48:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3476807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_bright_eyed_demigirl/pseuds/the_bright_eyed_demigirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dionysus was the Greek god of wine and hedonism. He was also a Shadow implanted into a robotic chassis by the Kirijo Group. Now his name is Teddie and he doesn't remember a thing except that he likes bears. A lot.</p><p>That last part is entirely Ikutsuki's fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dionysus; or, "It's like flicking a switch."

It’s the first time he’s ever seen anything that looks like him. Well, kind of. They are human and he is not, but he looks like a human. So actually, he’s never seen anything that he looks like until them.

It’s confusing and he doesn’t know what to think, so he talks to them.

The girl panics and gets angry at him. She’s really pretty, but she’s also really scary. The orange-haired boy isn’t much better. So he hides behind the grey-haired boy, who is kind to him when the others shout.

He helps them all leave, and hopes they never come back. But they do, just the boys this time, and they tell him that they want to help. And to his astonishment, they do.

Silver-haired Yu calls upon a monster that can fight the other monsters and win, and from that moment he calls him Sensei. Orange-haired Yosuke is just as surprised, and leads the way into the liquor store. He doesn’t help them much, because he doesn’t know how to fight and is scared, but he does help a bit. Everyone helps everyone.

Which is good when the other Yosuke shows up.

Just before Sensei and Yosuke leave, they ask him his name.

“Teddie.”

It seems to fit.

 

\---

 

_This wasn’t Tartarus. This was somewhere else entirely._

_But there were humans there, and he knew what to do with a human. He knew that they broke if you hit them hard enough, and he also knew that they wouldn’t mind because all humans want to die. That was the whole reason he existed, after all._

_He tried to change into his revealed form, but nothing happened. This was when he noticed that his form was far more solid than usual._

_On the plus side, when he hit the human on his right it went flying and smashed into the wall, so maybe there was something good about a solid form after all. He smirked in satisfaction._

_…?_

_Satisfaction…?_

_As the realisation that he’d just felt_ emotion _hit him, one of the humans shouted something any everything went black._

 

\---

 

The shouty, angry girl comes back again. This time, they’re all looking for a girl called Yukiko. The shouty girl is called Chie, and Yukiko is important to her, so naturally she goes charging off. Sensei, Yosuke and Teddie follow, and then Chie’s shadow attacks, but at least Chie can fight now.

Yukiko’s shadow almost burns them all to a crisp. Teddie can feel his fans whirring. An extra set that he didn’t know about even turn on, which surprises him to no end.

But when the fire’s cleared and Yukiko is safe, he feels glad that he could help. And if pretty Yuki-chan and pretty Chie-chan like him more for helping, then hey, that’s not a bad thing!

It occurs to him after they’ve left that he doesn’t actually know what scoring is. He scours his damaged databanks and works out that scoring is something you do with someone you love. So if he can score with the girls, that means they love him, right? It’s gotta be worth a shot!

Kanji’s shadow does not help. At all. Apparently some boys like to score with other boys. Teddie isn’t sure if he wants that.

Maybe if Sensei asked…?

Although, did he really want to know the answer to that question? There are a lot of questions to be asked, and he isn’t sure if he wants to know all of the answers. Who made him, and why? How did he get here?

Why had he been abandoned?

 

\---

 

_“Your name is Dionysus.”_

_Dionysus. Die-oh-nigh-sus. He was told that he’s named after a god, but what god is there except for Nyx? He didn’t say that, of course. Humans must know all about Nyx. They did create her, after all._

_They told him a lot of other things too. He was an experiment, to see if a Shadow could think like a human._

_“What a ridiculous notion,” said Dionysus._

_They kept trying anyway. They told him about the world, and about what things were. It was interesting, he supposed._

_Then one day, they told him that they were putting metal blades in his arms, so that he could fight. He pointed out that he already could, but they didn’t listen. Humans rarely listened to the truth, he’d realised. They just didn’t seem to want it._

_\---_

Rise-chan doesn’t know who she is.

Teddie can relate.

But her shadow is strong, too strong for even Sensei with his million bajillion Personae to handle.

That is when something odd happens. It’s like flicking a switch. Suddenly he can hear everything, feel everything, and Shadow Rise has no idea at all. He’s angry, and upset, because she’s hurting his friends.

So he hurts her back.

…the next thing he knows is that Rise-chan has a Persona and everything is way too hot. Kanji says he overheated. Teddie just wants everything to stop.

As his Shadow says.

It’s hard not to attack it when it says that.

 

\---

 

_“What the hell just happened?!”_

_Dionysus woke to find that he had absolutely no energy to move. Not that it mattered, he was restrained anyway._

_“I don’t know, Chairman, he just went berserk! Shadows can be very dangerous when provoked – I think something went wrong in the testing, and he tapped into that somehow.”_

_What had happened, anyway? He’d been testing, and then…_

_Were they going to scrap him?_

_“It’s an awful lot like Orgia Mode, isn’t it? Perhaps we could use it…”_

_“Yes, but he’s still recovering from the strain.”_

_“Then find a way to lessen the strain!”_

_He wouldn’t mind if it ended. Shadows seldom do._

_\---_

He spends the next couple of weeks recovering. During that time, he learns a number of things about himself.

Firstly, his Persona is named Kintouki-Douji. Something about all of this is confusing him, but he can’t work out what. His databanks tell him that Kintouki-Douji carried a tomahawk, and after learning of the multiple definitions of tomahawk he laughs himself silly.

Secondly, he has claws. Three long blades in each of his arms which come out when he wills them to. A shame – he wants to use a big sword like Sensei, but this will have to do.

Thirdly, there is absolutely nothing stopping him from leaving.

So he does, and he finds out that someone else died. He wonders for a minute if he’d missed something, and then he doesn’t think about that anymore because they have to catch the killer.

Yosuke takes him in. Yosuke’s parents don’t know that Teddie is a robot.

 

\---

 

Time passes.

They go to a place called Iwatodai and Teddie spends the entire time feeling that everything there is eerily familiar.

He’s pretty sure that Naoto-kun likes them all, but the boy detective is just refusing to admit it.

Teddie makes friends with Nana-chan, who is Sensei’s sister. Or cousin. The two words get used interchangeably and it’s kind of confusing, but Nana-chan is just adorable and he feels a little less lonely.

There’s a festival! It’s fun! Even if he almost gets outed…

And then Naoto-kun gets kidnapped, and after that he calls her Nao-chan, and she doesn’t complain.

 

\---

 

_Dionysus liked bears. He’d decided that he did, at any rate. He wasn’t sure what drew him to them, but he liked them._

_The Chairman probably had something to do with it. He’d come by one day and tried to teach Dionysus how to make puns, but the only puns Dionysus could remember were puns about bears._

_Dionysus found himself wondering where the Chairman had gone sometimes._

_Perhaps he had died. Humans did that a lot._

_But the point was that the Chairman had found those bear puns funny, and had bought Dionysus a teddie bear to celebrate the fact that he'd literally grown a sense of humour._

_And that was why Dionysus liked bears._

_\---_

Nana-chan died.

It hurts a lot. Teddie hasn’t felt hurt like that before.

He scans his databanks for an answer. What do you do when someone you love goes away?

Somewhere in that search, he finds a name. _Nyx._ And he searches some more, and finds his memories.

Now he wishes he hadn’t looked at all.

 

\---

 

_“Dionysus is out!”_

_The Fall had come. Dionysus had been waiting for it. He’d known it was coming, felt it come with every passing of the full moon, and now it had come._

_His Bestial Mode kicked in and he destroyed his restraints. No one stood in his way._

_He stepped out into the fresh air and saw Tartarus in the distance, in Iwatodai. So he ran towards it, and then there was a bright light and he saw a boy with blue hair._

_When he woke up, he was surrounded by fog._

_And the very literal heat of the moment had broken his memory._

_\---_

Sensei finds him in a dream, after Teddie wanders for a bit and almost gets hit by a white-haired man driving a limousine.

“I’m a Shadow,” Teddie says.

This clearly surprises Sensei.

“What do you mean?”

“I was created as an experiment, to see if you could make a Shadow human. They put me in a robot body and tried to make me a person.”

Sensei processes this.

“So how did you end up in the TV world?”

“That’s where all the Shadows went after the Fall.”

Sensei, to his credit, does not ask about the Fall. He can tell that something more important is going on here. There is something else that Teddie wants to say.

“My real name is Dionysus. It’s what they called me to make me think I was human. And… I think I am a bit human, Sensei.”

“Oh?”

He smiles sadly.

“All humans die. I was so happy with all of you, and Nana-chan, but now that she’s gone…” He sobs. “I’m going to die too. Like her.”

Sensei shakes his head.

“She’s alive, Teddie. She came back.”

It’s like flicking a switch.

A switch – from Kintouki-Douji to Kamui.

 

\---

 

When he comes back, he tells them everything. They’re not really surprised, which seems almost hurtful in a way.

Later, Sensei waxes eloquent on Jungian psychology, and Teddie is flummoxed but listens anyway. Nao-chan is intrigued to hear more about Teddie’s creation. When he says the name “Kirijo”, her eyes narrow but she doesn’t ask any more questions.

The girls make a cake for Nana-chan. Amazingly, it’s a success!

 

\---

 

Just before Sensei goes, Izanami comes and it feels like the Fall all over again, but this time Teddie is on the side of humanity.

And this time, he dies.

He decides that he doesn’t like it.

He only gets the chance to decide that because Sensei destroyed Izanami-no-Okami.

Something about Sensei reminds Teddie of the blue-haired boy in that moment. Maybe the blue-haired boy destroyed Nyx – no that’s silly, that doesn’t work!

Teddie just hopes that the blue-haired boy has lots of girls to score with now that he’s saved the world.

 

\--- 

 

Her name is Aigis, or Ai-chan.

She’s made of metal too.

She might have been made to destroy Shadows, but they are very similar in a lot of ways.

And the other girl is Labrys, or Labby-chan.

Teddie’s not sure, but he thinks he’s found a family.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay this is the first fic I've uploaded anywhere since I was about twelve. Also this is really really weirdly written and I apologise for that. Anyway, have an AU where Teddie is a robot.


End file.
